Quanta will build MIT's $100 laptop

Wednesday 14 December 2005 10.50 EST
First published on Wednesday 14 December 2005 10.50 EST

"Taiwan-based original design manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc. has been chosen as the ODM for the $100 laptop project sponsored by non-profit organization One Laptop Per Child. Quanta has agreed to devote significant engineering resources from the Quanta Research Institute (QRI) the first half of 2006, with a target of bringing the product to market the fourth quarter," reports EE Times.

Quanta is well known for manufacturing iMacs and PowerBooks including G4 and G5 notebooks for Apple, as well as making machines for Dell, HP, NEC, and others -- it's reckoned to produce about a quarter of the world's notebooks. As reported earlier, it had already signed a deal with the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) [to] undertake a five-year joint research and development project to develop a future generation of portable computing devices."

The launch of 5 to 15 million units will be both in large-scale pilot projects in seven culturally diverse countries (China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand), with one million units in each of these countries, and an additional modest allocation of machines to seed developer communities in a number of other selected countries. A commercial version of the machine will be explored in parallel.

However, only governments get the $100 deal, and any commercial version is expected to cost $200.